Well, a lot of the "just works" experience comes from their tight
control over what's inside the shiny shell. It will be interesting to
see what happens to that if/when the widely anticipated official
support for OS X on generic Intel boxes arrives.

I'm not compelled that the seamlessness of the mac experience is
particularly Modernist, though. No-one who wants to deploy on the Mac
is compelled to write in Objective C against Cocoa. They doen't even
need to target Aqua, X11 is there. They don't even need to write an
native app at all.

Ives's use of Modernist styleing cues on the outside of Macs is _very_
ironic postmodernsim. I once had to fall back on "like an Apple
product" when trying to explain to someone what was so great about a
late 60's Braun cine camera I inherited.

Thinking of modernist German items reminds me of something my friend
Mark said after returning from a year or so living with his then
girlfiend in Bavaria. It's not, he said, that Germans are arrogant,
it's just that they don't understand why anyone would do things
differently from the the way they do them, since it is so clearly
superior. That seems a very Modern sentiment, not surprising when you
consider where much of Modernist design orginated. It's not
particularly odious as utopianism goes, though. Modernism seems only
to have become maglignant after its leading lights' escape from
another, infinitely odious, "utopianism" in their, and its, homeland.

Mark continued: and once you've been there for a while, you begin to
see their point.

Keith

--- In postmodernprogramming@yahoogroups.com, Steve Freeman
<steve@...> wrote:
>
> I was thinking more of the Apple approach to branding and
> presentation, rather than the messy internals underneath. Their view
> seems to be very much that there's a consistent approach to the
> experience of using their kit (it just works), rather than, say, the
> linux cloud of functionality.
>
> S.
>
> On 10 Apr 2006, at 10:18, Martin Fowler wrote:
> >> I'm writing this on a Mac, very much a modernist
> >> machine (OK, maybe that's not the best example :).
> >
> > Interesting in a talk James Noble took a different perspective. He
> > contrasted the Kay dream of a dynabook running everything off the
> > Modernist Smalltalk to the reality of the PowerBook running on
> > decidedly
> > post-modern Unix.
>